Version Control - part 4 (with images) (Patreon)

Sera comes home at six-fifteen. I hear her key and I'm in the kitchen, standing at the counter, wine in hand.

She drops her bag in the hallway. "Hey." Coming toward the kitchen. "How was the day?"

"Good. A lot of words."

She stops in the kitchen doorway. "How many?"

"Fourteen hundred."

"On the shed essay."

"On the shed essay."

She looks at me — warm, direct, the full attention she's had since the implant. She doesn't scan my chest. She doesn't avoid it either.

"That's huge," she says. "That's really great."

She attacks half of a red pepper, some wilted spinach, and a block of cheddar on the kitchen counter with a knife. I pour her a glass of wine while I’m watching and hand it to her.

"How was yours," I say.

"Long." She picks up the wine without looking, takes a sip, puts it back. "We had the Paulson seminar. Two hours of everyone performing how seriously they'd read the assigned texts."

"How seriously had they?"

"Fernanda had. Maybe two others." She scrapes the pepper into a pan. "It's the same every year. Half the room coasted and the other half carried them and everyone got credit."

"And you."

"I read it three times." She says this without pride, just reporting. "There's a translation problem in the Adorno that I couldn't let go of. Two different renderings of the same passage and they completely invert the argument. I spent two hours on that before I even started the seminar prep."

"Which translation was right?"

She looks at me over her shoulder. "Neither, probably. That's the thing. They're both defensible and they mean opposite things." She turns back to the stove. "Somebody should write about that."

"Write about it yourself."

"Maybe." She cracks some eggs into a bowl. "How was the implant today. Was it — noticeable? Like, did you feel it working?"

"Nothing dramatic. Just, whatever was weighing me down seemed to be lifted. A barrier removed."

She's whisking the eggs when she says it. "After that it gets more subtle." The pan's already hot — she pours them in without looking.

She hands me the knife for the onion and starts talking about a student who's been citing things he hasn't read. Not plagiarism exactly — he's pulling citations from other people's footnotes, building a kind of borrowed bibliography. She finds this interesting. I'm not sure she's wrong to. I watch her stir while I chop, her profile when she's working through something has this aspect where her mouth moves slightly, not words, just the edge of words, and then her head tips a little when she gets where she was going.

The omelets come out clean. We carry them to the table.

We talk about the student while we’re eating, the omelet full of flavor as usual.

I'm three bites in when she looks up. Not at my chest. At my face.

"What's going on," she says.

"Something happened today."

"What happened."

I set my fork down. "Something physical." A pause. "I called the clinic this morning. I'm on the cancellation list."

She's very still. "What kind of something."

I look at her for a moment. "It’s easier if I can just show you."

“Okay.”

"It happened this morning while I was writing. I called the clinic right away and I've been trying to—" I stop. The sentence doesn't have an ending. "Can I just show you."

"Yes," she says. "Show me."

I push back from the table and stand up and pull the flannel off. I'm in just the t-shirt now and even that much is different — the silhouette clear, the shape unmistakable through the thinner fabric. I watch her face.

She stares.

Then she's on her feet, fast, the chair scraping back. "What the — " She stops. "Are those — " Steps around the table toward me. "Are those real?"

"Yes."

"How — " She reaches out and then her hand stops mid-air. "Can I — "

"Yes."

She puts both hands on my shoulders and looks at my chest from close range and her face is cycling through something — shock first, then something harder to read moving underneath it. "When did this — "

"Sometime this morning. I was writing. I got up for water and noticed."

"You were just sitting there and — "

"Yes."

"Declan." She steps back. Her voice has gone flat in the way voices go flat when someone is working very hard to stay calm. "That's not — that can't just — "

"I know."

She turns away and puts her hands on the back of her chair. I watch her back. The set of her shoulders, the stillness of someone running through something fast. She's quiet for long enough that I start to say something and she holds up one hand without turning around, just — wait. I wait.

"Let me see properly," she says.

I pull the t-shirt over my head.

The air hits them and the nipples tighten immediately — the cold arriving on the skin, the tissue responding whether I want it to or not. I stand in the overhead light of my kitchen and let her look.

She comes closer. She reaches out and this time she does touch — both hands, placed carefully, holding rather than pressing. Her palms are warm on the surface of the tissue and I watch her face while she does this.

And then the familiar warmth starts up. The tissue responds to her hands like it responded in the kitchen when I touched it myself — a low arousal, body paying attention. I feel it rising and I can't do anything about it and I watch her face and she sees it. The slight change in the tissue under her hands, the fabric of my jeans, beginning to tent. She glances up at me and back down and her hands go still. She lifts her hands and steps back and I watch her take a breath before she looks at her own palms, really looks at them, like she's comparing what she felt with what she knows. When she looks up her face has done something I've only seen once or twice in three years — her composure coming back with her mouth settling before her eyes do.

"Sera."

She doesn't answer right away.

"What. Tell me what you're thinking."

She takes her hands back. She looks at them for a moment — actually looks at her own hands, palms up, like she's checking something. And then she says, almost to herself: "It's almost the — " She stops. A short breath. Her hands close.

"The what," I say.

"Nothing." She looks up. "I'm probably wrong."

"Probably wrong about what."

She steps back and reaches up to the top button of her own shirt and I understand what she's going to do before she does it. She unbuttons her shirt and we both look back and forth between my chest and hers.

She puts her hands on her own breasts, then reaches forward and puts them on mine, then back to hers. Measuring something. Her face running a problem.

"I can't be sure," she says. "The angle is different, it's hard to tell. I'm probably wrong." She buttons her shirt.

"Probably," I say.

She looks at me. I look at her.

I put my t-shirt back on and sit back down and pick up my fork. We eat the rest of the dinner without talking much.

We clean up out of habit. She hands me a plate without looking. I dry it.

“Should we call the company, whoever made it?”

I think about it for a minute, keep drying the dishes without responding.

I finish drying the last fork. Sera’s hands are still wet. I hand her the towel and she dries them off. The towel goes back on the dishwasher’s handle when she’s done.

I stack the plates in the cabinet, looking in her direction. She fails to notice.

"Wanna watch something?" I ask.

"Sure."

Something procedural is on — we've seen it before, or most of it, one of those shows where the episodes blur. New one, according to the guide. Doesn't matter.

Sera's at the other end of the couch, feet tucked, scrolling. At some point she migrates closer and swings her feet up onto my lap, ankles across my thighs — she always does this. I put my hand on her ankle. The show has a man in a suit and a woman with a badge and they're arguing about something; I've lost the thread.

Around eleven she says we should sleep.

I brush my teeth, wash my face. Reach for the t-shirt I sleep in — the fitted one, thin cotton — and stop with it in my hands. Eight hours of that fabric against the breast tissue. I fold it and put it back.

I try a looser t-shirt. Better but — lying down, I discover quickly, the breasts don't go anywhere. On my back they fall outward, the weight redistributing toward my sides, pulling at the chest wall in a way that's insistent without being painful. On my side the lower breast takes the weight of the upper one. They compress together and the skin-to-skin contact is warm, the weight of the upper one on the lower a pressure I can't tune out.

I lie on my stomach: I make it four seconds, maybe. They don't flatten out. The chest wall goes into the mattress and the breast tissue — denser than I expected, less give to it — takes the pressure straight on. An immediate wrongness with every breath, the mattress not accommodating. I roll back.

Flannel again. Unbuttoned, just draped. Nothing pressing on anything.

Sera comes out of the bathroom in her sleep shirt, sees me, doesn't say anything about the flannel. Gets in. Turns off the lamp.

On my back in the dark, the breasts fall outward toward the mattress on either side. I can feel them — the weight, the warmth coming off them, the small movement with each breath. 

Thirty-one years of sleeping positions and every one of them has a new version now. I'm going through them in my head while Sera breathes next to me.

I roll toward her, get my top arm across my chest to manage the weight. That helps some. The room is quiet.

Faintly — very faintly — I can feel my pulse in them. Not from outside the muscle, how you feel your heartbeat in your chest normally. From inside the tissue itself. I lie there and feel it, which doesn’t stop being strange.

Sera's breathing is steady, deliberate. She’s still awake. Neither of us says anything.